


Oh, Shit.

by icebucky



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brothers, Dean's POV, Destiel - Freeform, F/M, Inspired By Tumblr, M/M, holy hell destiel, seasons 1 through 4, the beginning of destiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 19:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2162190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icebucky/pseuds/icebucky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sees him smile, and all he can think is, "Oh, shit."</p>
<p>A Dean/Castiel fic that focuses on Dean's development over the first four seasons, including his perspective on relationships, and culminating in the first time Cas smiles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oh, Shit.

**Author's Note:**

> So this was inspired by this post: http://slayerdeans.tumblr.com/post/95111384032/ten-word-poem-5
> 
> It's kinda feelsy. Sorry.

_He smiled, and all I could think was, "Oh, shit."_

-

In all honesty, Dean doesn’t have the time or the patience to think about love, about making it last, about even the slightest possibility of caring about someone enough to spend the rest of his life with them. He knows from experience that it ends bloody or it ends sad, and he'd like to stay away from that for as long as possible.

Sam tried. For years, Sam has been trying to get away from the life, to find that one reason, the one person who made him willing to drop everything he's ever known and run to be with them. Dean mocks him gently when he sees his little brother uttering the casual statement _Dean, this is my girlfriend, Jessica,_ and he can see, he knows the way that Sam looks at her and the way she looks at him, and Dean knows that this is real. This is what his brother was made to be, she makes him who he is. And in all honesty, Dean's jealous. He wants that for himself, he wants what he knows he can never have, he wants what Sam has always fought so hard to have, but he is not and never has been stupid, despite the way everyone seems to see Sam as the smart brother. Dean knows that one of them has to have the duty, one of them has to have the responsibility, one of them has to hold up the family business when Dad is dead and gone. But in all honesty, Dean doesn’t want to be that one, the son who stays and does his duty for the family. It'd be nice to be selfish every once in a while.

But Sam loses Jess, and his dreams explode in flames as the apartment burns. Dean pulls him out of the inferno and holds him close as he struggles to get back inside, back to her. And Dean does not glory for one tiny, horrible moment in the knowledge that if he can't have it at least Sam can't have it either, and the sharp curl of malice that accompanies the loss of Jess is tied to finding Dad, she was the spark that lit Sam's fire, the reason that he was willing to leave Stanford and the purpose to his quest, why they became brothers again and why they spent a year searching for their absent father only to lose him to the demon that snatched them from a normal childhood with their burning mother. He does not, because if he did, he would be worse than he was willing to admit to himself.

It's not in Dean's nature to give up, but the loss of his father is staggering, and it leaves him reeling, lost, unable to focus. He slams the crowbar into the trunk of the Impala and snaps at Sam and cries more than he'd like to admit. Dad wouldn’t have tolerated that, he knows, but he can't stop it. He's grateful for distractions and hunts and brutally dismantling the things that go bump in the night. He knows that he's gotten darker and surlier but he still laughs, he still makes jokes, and he's still him, he's still Dean. He has his purpose, the purpose that has been his everything since he was four years old and his parents brought home that warm little bundle from the hospital; his purpose is to watch out for Sammy. Dean watches out for Sammy and he knows that Sammy has his back in everything, and Dean doesn’t focus on finding a someone, that was always more Sam's area than his anyway.

He thinks, at one point, that he could've had something with Jo. She's beautiful, and she's smart, and she's a badass. She hunts and she grins and she knows her way around people and she's far better than Ellen gives her credit for. It's true, Dean could see himself falling for her, and there's some sort of spark between them when he looks at her, and in all honesty, Dean's pretty turned on when she shuts down his suggestion of how to spend the hours that Ash gives them before he'll have an answer for them. He sees how good she is, she's a hunter at her core, she's incredible and she's brilliant and he knows he's far too emotionally constipated and repressed to ever say anything about this to her, but he likes her, he likes her a lot. Of course, though, the other shoe drops, and Ellen snaps, Jo retreats, and they don’t see her for a while. Dean resigns himself to the fact that this is his life, this is the hunter's life, and it doesn’t work like that, it doesn’t end in neighborhoods and barbeques and PTA meetings and picket fences and worrying about your kids playing in the street. That's not how it works and although he's always sort of known that, it's never really hit him. He's never felt the need to have those things.

Or he didn’t, at least. Not until the djinn traps him in the confines of his own mind and if his biggest secret, his most desperate wish is that his mother had never died, then Dean doesn’t care, he's not ashamed of that. He's dropped into a world of his own imagining and it's perfect, almost perfect, but he doesn’t call Sam Sammy and they aren't brothers, they're barely related, and even though Mom and Jess are alive and Dean has a girl of his own, it's not right, he can feel that it isn't right. His purpose for as long as he can remember is _watch out for Sammy_ and if he doesn’t have this then he almost doesn’t know who he is anymore.

He stabs himself in the gut and wakes up to his baby brother shaking him and shouting his name, and he's relieved, for a split second he's relieved, and then, it seems like before he can blink, Sam's gone, he went into the store to get pie, and Dean was in the car, but Sammy never came back, and when he went in to check it out, he can't process what he sees. His brother is gone and he doesn’t know what to do, Sam is his entire world, and he can't, he can't function without his little brother, his calm, intelligent, soothing little brother who balances Dean's fire and instinct and give-'em-hell attitude, he can't process this. Dean calls Bobby and they work on a solution but it's hopeless, he doesn’t know where Sammy is and he's panicking, he's failed in his one purpose and his life is basically a wash now. He let Sammy slip away and there isn't even a cell signal for him to track. There's a pain in his head and he has what Sam has, the visions or whatever the hell they are, and he knows where his brother is, he knows how to fix this, he has to get there. Dean and Bobby get in the car and they drive and night is falling when he sees Sammy, he sees his little brother, and he calls his name, he shouts for Sammy, and Sam calls back but there's someone behind him, Dean shouts for Sam to turn around but he's too late, he can hear the piercing of Sam's skin and the shattering of his spine and Dean knows, he knows that where it struck went right through his brother's heart too. No, no, no, this can't happen, this isn't happening, we'll patch you up, Sammy, you'll be okay. You'll be okay.

But Sam isn't okay and neither is Dean, despite what he tells Bobby until he can't shove it down anymore. He explodes at Bobby and he shoves him off and drinks until he can almost barely numb the pain and gets in the car. He digs the hole and makes the deal and Sam is walking again and it's worth it, because Dean didn’t fail in his one purpose, and he knows that there should be more to his life than this, he's only twenty-seven, and he should be doing something with himself. There should be more to his universe than Sam, but there isn't. Sam is the sun that he revolves around, and he would do anything for his little brother. He doesn’t think that bringing Sam back with a year-long timer on his own life is bad, he'd do it again in a heartbeat, and he doesn’t have to tell him, does he? They shoot Azazel and they finish their father's work and Sam tears up when he finds out, and Dean realizes, he sees it now, he's doing the same thing to Sammy as Sam did to him just a day or two ago. Dean couldn’t handle being so alone, the emptiness of the Sam-shaped hole in his life was too much to deal with, and so he realizes that he's subjecting Sam to that same loss in a year. He's selfish and he's horrible but he'd go to hell for his brother again in a heartbeat, even though he knows, he knows he doesn’t deserve it and he deserves a hell of a lot better end than the one he's going to get.

He sucks it up, though, smiles through the oncoming storm and the depression and the alcoholism that has been creeping in since they lost Dad. Dean is a Winchester, he's a man, and the way Winchester men deal with their emotional problems is to pretend that they don’t exist and focus on killing something that killed someone else to make the opportunity to talk about it go away. This is the Dean Winchester school of dealing with feelings, and they don't tolerate discussion there. He makes jokes and he laughs and he tries to make it better for Sam, but he can see his little brother hurting and when the time comes all he can feel is relief for one split second.

One split second of darkness, and then the red.

There's red everywhere, the pain from having his chest ripped open by hellhounds has dissipated, but Dean sees in red and black and the hot pain in his everywhere. Hooks and chains and screams, he's suspended from nowhere and everywhere and he wants to get out but he won't let himself think that, he's better than that, he can make it, it's better him than Sam, right?

Alastair comes and he rips and he slices and he tears into Dean every single damn day, and pain reaches a new level, Dean thought he knew pain before this, but no, pain was just something that he felt on a daily basis, pain was something that was a soft sunset color, brilliant and burning, but not agonizing, not this level of excruciating destruction. Every day, it starts over, and Dean has maybe a few minutes to himself before Alastair comes in again, and he's strapped to the table, and he knows, he knows that all he has to do is tell Alastair yes, to say yes, he wants off the rack, but he won't do that, he's fought his entire life to be better than the monsters he hunts and he's not about to break that promise in the afterlife.

It goes on for thirty years, and Dean can't take it anymore. He takes the knife and he becomes a student of hell and he's a monster, he knows, but he can't think about that right now, he needs to stay himself, he can't let himself become a pathetic, mangled shell of who he used to be. Dean stands over the carving block for another ten years and he makes a name for himself and Alastair says he shows promise, even though Dean doesn’t want this. Forty years, he's been here for forty years, and then comes the white light.

 

There's white light, it's like staring into the sun, the stars, and the moon combined. It's the most incredible, beautiful, staggering thing that Dean has ever seen, and it comes to him, he perceives that this is a being, but he's limited, he can't see it for what it really is. There's a hand on his shoulder and he's burning, fire's coursing through his veins but he can't bring himself to care, because this is the most stunning thing he's ever experienced, and he doesn’t care if it leaves a scar. This thing is probably taking him somewhere to die but Dean could care less. He'd be happy knowing that he was killed by this magnificent undefined creature.

There's black everywhere, but a different kind of black. His eyelids glow with the absence of the white thing, but - _he has eyelids_. Dean crawls his way out of the grave and he doesn’t understand, he's alive? Is this some concoction of Alastair's, some kind of test? No, Dean realizes as he breaks into the gas station. This is real, this is his life, this is his universe. He's been given a second chance, and whatever it was that broke him out of the pit must have been one powerful motherfucker, because the gravesite looks like it was hit by a bomb. The glass shatters with that high frequency noise and Dean thinks that this is the end, he's going to die again without seeing Sammy, without getting away from the September heat, but it stops and he drives to Bobby and they drive to Sam and for a second, for one glorious second, it's all okay.

But then Sam takes the car and Bobby and Dean go to the barn and there's the pounding, the rattling, the shaking wind and the exploding lights and _he_ walks in, trench coat flying and dark hair a mess, and Dean can't help but think that if this is the beautiful white light that pulled him out of the pit, then something's not right, because he can't see it anymore. He's not beautiful, he's just an ordinary guy in a coat. A tax accountant, basically.

He calls himself Castiel, he says he's an angel of the Lord, and Dean doesn’t want to believe in angels, this isn't what he was raised to believe, this is more Sam's area, believing in things that he can't see with his own eyes. Dean believes his five senses and the people who can give him firsthand accounts of this, and God isn't on his radar, much less his angels. Castiel says that they have work for him and Dean could care less about this chosen spot in heaven's army, he has better things to focus on, because Sam's in contact with Ruby again and Dean doesn’t trust her, she's bad news and he can read it in the smirk she wears and the curl of her voice when she talks to them. He has to watch out for Sammy, that's his mission, but in all honesty, he had hoped that coming back from the dead would be a new start for him.

It wasn’t, and Dean should have known that this was too much to ask for. And the way he looks at things, it seems like Sam has given up on finding the other half to his heart, the part that burned with Jess, and he loses a part of himself when he sees the way that Sam has darkened in his four months of absence. He did this, _Dean_ made his little brother into a hardened version of himself, Sam's supposed to be in law school and getting married and having kids right about now, but no, they're dealing with Apocalyptic shit and they don’t have time for regrets. The seals have been broken and it's Dean's fault and he sits on a park bench with Cas, because he's Cas now, Dean can't not call him Cas, he's one of them, despite the dick angels he hangs out with, and he looks to his left and Cas smiles at something he said.

Cas smiles.

Involuntarily, Dean smiles back, even though there's absolutely nothing to smile about, but he smiles anyway, because it's Cas that makes him smile, and even though this isn't going to make anything better, he glows a little inside at the fact that the angel can turn up the corners of his mouth a little.

And then Dean recognizes the feeling, the light buzzing in his chest that he gets when he looks at the dorky little angel, and the way his smile made the day a little better, the way he grinned back involuntarily, and the way that his eyes automatically gravitate towards the messy dark hair and the crooked blue tie. He knows that feeling, he's had it countless times before and he can't do this, no, this isn't what he needs right now, he can't have feelings right now, he can't deal with attraction to another being right now, he swore this off when he struggled out of a pine box and into the world again, but his heart isn't listening, and even though Castiel, Cas, this angel drives him insane and isn't what he needs right now, there's something there, and Dean can't shake it.

He can't shake it, and he can't confront it, and he doubts he ever will. He doesn’t want to think about being attracted to someone who may be one of his best friends, much less that someone being an angel of the Lord, much less that angel of the Lord inhabiting a distinctly male body. He can't think about the fact that this is the person that yanked him out of eternal agony, who saved him from turning into something that he's not, and he can't think about the fact that this, this person, this angel who is here for him all the time and who comes when he calls and is powerful and so intensely _good_ that he wants to scream, he can't think about the fact that sometimes he wants to do dirty things to him and find out what's underneath that heavy trench coat, he can't think about the fact that even though Sam has given up, Dean's always secretly wanted to find his person, to think that there was someone out there who was the missing puzzle piece that made up his entire being, and he's always wanted to find this for himself, to be able to have this one thing for himself that Dad can't take away. He wants to find that person and though he knows it's far from likely to happen, he can't shut down the hope that Cas is his person, but no, he can't think about that right now, he can't think about this now or maybe ever. Dean can't think about this, so he shoves it down, trying to squash the bubbles that he gets when his eyes fall on the little smirk on the angel's face.

But sometimes it just happens and Cas smiles, and Dean has to look away, because when he sees Cas smile, he can feel himself tumbling into something that's far from platonic and all he can think is, _Oh, shit._


End file.
